Gregory Eddi Jones is raising funds to publish his upcoming book Promise Land with Self Publish Be Happy and we think you should support it.

Promise Land is a 200-page, epic visual poem that reinterprets T.S. Eliot’s classic “The Waste Land” through a contemporary lens. Picking up where the poem left off nearly a century ago, Gregory Eddi Jones jacks and manipulates stock images and video stills, into unreal, sometimes cartoonish, sometimes pictorial riffs on the clichéd experiences they represent.

Chirping birds, boring cat photos, clouds, rainbows, and other dentist-office-poster images fade and break apart at varying degrees on the page, often looking like a marriage of classic impressionism and amateur “Microsoft-paint-ism”…. and that’s precisely the point.

For Jones, the cheapness of these photographic conventions and how he treats them reflect what he considers the “spiritual poverty of common cultural pictures.” En masse, they envision photography’s potential to do more than just regurgitate a simulation of these base experiences.

Nearing the end of his Kickstarter campaign (hey readers, you should help fund this!) I caught up with Greg to learn more and wrap my head around his wild work…

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Gregory Eddi Jones

PostedJune 8, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Art News, Photobooks, Publications

Tags2021 photobooks, Gregory Eddi Jones, The Waste Land, photography inspired by The Waste Land, Photography inspired by T.S. Eliot, contemporary photography, Pictures Generation, Self Publish Be Happy, Promise Land, post photography

Virginia Wilcox's new book Arboreal, published by Deadbeat Club shows a sinewed relationship between Los Angeles trees and the sprawling landscape they inhabit.

Spidery branches look over and onto highways, pointing and wrapping like withered fingers. Their power is in the space around them, their conversation with the land, the occasional person sitting for a portrait, or the built human presence for which they continue to make space.

“These images present a survey of trees inhabiting a mangled urban landscape that looks something like wilderness,” writes Wilcox. The work does more than simply note urban development's impact on nature - it portrays a melancholic meditation on coexistence. A mirror leans against a palm tree reflecting bramble and sky behind it; a stand of baron trunks mimics a distant downtown skyline; a pathway stretches to reveal an anonymous figure on a park bench who almost disappears in their knotty camouflage.

As a collection of images, Arboreal is a quest for coexistence in an increasingly hostile world, and Wilcox’s soft, wistful way of seeing creates entry points from many angles.

I spoke with Wilcox to learn more about the book and her life within it.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Virginia Wilcox

PostedMay 12, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

Categoriesinterviews, Artists, Photobooks, Publications

TagsVirginia Wilcox, Arboreal book, tree photography, Photo series about Los Angeles, 2021 photobooks, Deadbeat Club publisher, large format photography, contemporary black and white photography

A Time of Youth editor Lisa McCarty highlights the importance of preserving an artist's intention through the example of the extensive and meticulous archive of photographer William Gedney.

William Gedney was a New York street photographer who earned four major art grants including a Guggenheim and Fullbright Fellowship in the late 60s. The first of these allowed him to travel to San Francisco, settling in Haight-Ashbury right before the Summer of Love. His photographs are contemplatively personal, focusing on the intimacy between people at the time.

Through his lifetime, Gedney created many book maquettes but never received a publishing contract. One of these maquettes was developed solely from the photographs taken during his time in San Francisco. After dying of AIDS in 1989, the maquette entitled, A Time of Youth, was left to the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University, who recently published the book with the artist's intent in mind.

A Time of Youth sequences eighty-seven of over two thousand photographs Gedney took in Haight-Ashbury between October 1966 and January 1967. These photographs document the complex lives of youth at the center of 1960s counterculture. Gedney lived among them in their communal homes, photographing the intimacy of their everyday life. It’s an alternative snapshot of the San Francisco counterculture, going deeper than the surface-level, care-free depictions of 1960s flower children. Handwritten descriptions and ephemera complement Gedney’s photographs giving deeper context to his experience and work.

Artist, professor, and archivist Lisa McCarty edited and the book, reanimating Gedney's work with deep respect and homage to his original sequence and creative decisions.

Duke Archive of Documentary Arts curatorial assistant Cassandra Klos speaks with McCarty on her experience and process working through Gedney's historical archive.

PostedApril 14, 2021

AuthorCassandra Klos

CategoriesArtists, Art News, Publications, Photobooks, writing on photography

TagsWilliam Gedney, photo history, history of photography, Lisa McCarty, Photography and the Summer of Love, A Time of Youth Photobook, A Time of Youth

Stacy Mehrfar’s new photo book, The Moon Belongs to Everyone, is an abstract allegory for suspended identity.

The Moon Belongs To Everyone, published by GOST books takes an unexpected and highly metaphoric approach to immigration, diaspora, and cultural dislocation. Weaving through cold, blistering landscapes, found still lifes and deep dark, forest scenes, Mehrfar visualizes the experience of feeling out of place and the desire to belong and connect while mourning the loss of one’s roots.

The series responds to Mehrfar’s move, at the age of 30, from New York City to Sydney, Australia. An Iranian-Jewish woman who grew up in Long Island, she felt disrupted and out of place having never imagined living anywhere outside of New York. In search of connection, she also began interviewing and photographing other immigrants with similar experiences, ultimately making images that fall somewhere in between traditional portraiture and candid scenes – an apt metaphor for the cultural in-between.

When Mehrfar returned “home,” to New York City a few years ago, her feelings didn’t resolve - they got more complicated and her sense of rootlessness continued to splinter. Volleying detached portraits with shivering landscapes, she exacerbates this discomfort, the sensation of going in and out and never feeling at home.

Jon Feinstein in conversation with Stacy Mehrfar

PostedMarch 15, 2021

AuthorJon Feinstein

CategoriesArtists, Galleries, interviews, Portfolio, Photobooks, Publications

TagsStacy Mehrfar, Diaspora Studies, GOST books, Jewish photographers, Jewish-Iranian photographers, Jewish-American photographers, Contemporary Landscape Photography, Contemporary Portraiture, new photography, contemporary photography, detached landscape

Alex Christopher Williams’ new photobook Black Like Paul explores the complexities of race, masculinity, and what it means to pass as white.

A child of interracial marriage, Alex Christopher Williams stands astride two worlds - one white, one Black - each framed by race as a social, economic, and cultural construct.

Williams passes for white. Though the definition has expanded to include ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, and gender, from a genealogical perspective, passing describes biracial people who identify with or are perceived as belonging to a different racial group based on their appearance. Across the vast and violent span of American history, passing was a survival technique that granted some Black people access to education, employment, and relative safety before the law.

Black, Like Paul, Williams soon-to-be released book produced by Kris Graves Projects’ new imprint Monolith Editions, focuses on the photographer’s experience of navigating racial hybridity. Williams strives to understand his father Paul’s experiences as a Black man, and by extension, that of many men in his immediate and ancestral family and community. Looking at the book, readers may momentarily stand in Williams’ shoes, looking into a world that is familiar in some ways, and unknowable in others.

We recently spoke about going unnoticed in a world that regularly degrades the bodies of Black men and boys, and using photography to access heritage that is challenging to inhabit.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Alex Christopher Williams.

PostedFebruary 25, 2021

AuthorRoula Seikaly

CategoriesArtists, Art News, Photobooks, Portfolio, Publications

TagsAlex Christopher Williams, Kris Graves Projects, Monolith Editions, Roula Seikaly, Humble Arts Foundation, photography about race, Black Like Paul, contemporary photography, Atlanta photographers, Race in America

Help This Wild Contemporary Photographic Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" Get Published

The Scraggly Poetic Life of Los Angeles Trees

The Reanimation of William Gedney, Over Fifty Years After the Summer of Love

A Lunar Metaphor for Migration, Diaspora, and Disorientation

Navigating The Nuances of Passing As White